Saint Cards 9

The next two days are a pause to digest the sequence of last eight considerations. As a reminder, these considerations were drawn from Judith Butler’s Giving an Account of Oneself. That book’s project is ultimately to think about ethics, and so responsibility, from a groundwork for thinking about oneself, or any self, as an entity that is fundamentally social, never the full of possession its nominal holder, and whose appearances and declarations are always to a degree performative rather than essential—selecting and enacting self-understanding through the tools of narrative (“narrative” not even as formal writing here, but in the sense that telling stories about what happened/is happening/will happen underlies language). 

I want to pause for a few days to think about how to pivot all that material toward thinking about character. I’ve been using “figure” in the hopes that it’s a more empty placeholder for a writing prompt than “character,” less laden with ideas about how one is supposed to conjure one into a piece of writing or compose their appearances. But now I’d like to address the idea of character a little more head on, maybe make a space to remake my sense of what character is, and what it requires. 

The first question — and this is really a question instead of a prompt — is about authorial control. I’ll take as a working premise the idea that if a self is not fully knowable, then a character should also be not fully knowable—not to the reader or audience, but also not to me, the author. So the question is how do I make space for that which I don’t know or control to enter into my writing of this character? 

Thinking about this put me in mind of the composer Morton Feldman’s idea of “decontrol,” something I first encountered in the performance maker and writer Matthew Goulish’s beautiful essay, “A Transparent Lecture.” Feldman introduced strategies into his music notation that “decontrolled” the performance of that music, so that the music made in each performance of any of his scores was a collaboration, a making-in-relationship, between Feldman and the musician performing. Decontrol is different from never having control. It is a kind of relinquishing, setting something you’ve caught in hand back into motion.

What are ways to decontrol the appearance and development of a character, the materials or images from which they grow and cohere, so that you, the author, do not possess them as a fully knowable entity? 

Tomorrow I will share some strategies I’ve encountered or invented for this decontrol, but I want to leave the slate open at first. Respond to the question by noting some strategies for decontrol. Take what comes to mind, which might be a recollection instead of a proposal — recalling how a certain character you wrote in the past, one who possessed both vitality and opacity, arose, whether through accident or strategy or a braid of both (or a strategy of accidents). 

And then: 

Use a strategy of decontrol to conjure a character in mind, their presence felt as a push or pull. 

Write a short piece for that character that combines portrait and text.

Open variables:

Presence: the thought experiment passes through a kind of story form (“imagine a scene”), but the endpoint of the prompt is toward a record not of what happened or didn’t happen, but of the presence of that figure; the thought experiment is a instrument for getting near in order to register the figure, their effects on others. What’s registered as presence? Think of this open variable as a continuum between radiance (as overwhelming outflow from one to another), reciprocity (as feedback loop between two or more), and withdrawal (of one from another). 

Short: invitation to treat this as a tiny daily exercise—limit it by minutes spent, word count, or page space. This workshop is not cumulative, so you can take up the scale and limit differently each time you choose to write.

Piece: you might write a microstory, a caption, a song, a dialogue, a commemoration, a tiny play, a choreographic score, a meditation or prayer of some kind, a list of images, notes for a character study, or any other form useful to you as a container for this presence.

Figure: is the figure real or invented; gone and remembered or still living; is the figure mapped onto the fullness of a person or does the figure appear as something different than “full” in this sense (a slip, a ghost, an allegory, a disembodied voice, a half-memory, a dream composite…)

Portrait: The portrait might be a description drawn in words, separate or integrated into the rest. It might be a drawing or a collage, or a performed photograph you take of yourself, in the style of Cindy Sherman.

Grammatical person: are you writing “I” or “we” in first-person, writing “you” in second-person, writing “she/he/they+” in third? Addressed to the past or addressed to the future?

Architecture of a Day (Notes on Practice)

One of the things I do with my time is facilitate writing groups, both short and ongoing seasons of writing in the presence of others through a series of cycles, which may be locally defined as writing weeks, or writing fortnights, or other durations. Usually I begin our meetings by asking each writer to report on how their practice of writing went in the last cycle. It’s seductive to meet this request for a report by reporting on the interval between what one wanted to do and what one did. I wanted to write daily but on I only wrote once, and so on. I wanted to develop this other project but instead I transcribed fragments from my notebooks. 

Maybe there is something in this metric of lack that has some use? Maybe it allows us to sidestep the question, what is this writing that I actually wrote, labels the writing as not our real writing, something less than our real writing, where “real” takes on the old romantic connotation of a glorious capital-R Real that somehow exceeds the illusory, fragmented confusion of the actual world we find ourselves in. But I am interested in perceiving the being of the writing that has actually been written, which includes a perception of its futurities, its potentialities, its realities, perhaps, but attends most closely to what it is now. 

If a writer reports on the gap between plan and actuality as a form of lack or failure, I ask them to reframe the gap. The writing that happened: how did it happen? What were you doing when you wrote? In distinction to what you thought you needed to do to get yourself writing, what did you find out you actually need? How does the perceived failure to follow the plan teach you something about the expansive conditions in which writing can get written? The interval between what we project and what we find ourselves doing can be playful, can be a conversation, rather than just a source of disappointment. 

The question comes up again and again, what actually constitutes “the writing”? 

The other question is: Could we play with different understandings of the architecture of a day, a week, or a month, and the way that writing or making or just being with that free creative impulse might live within that rhythm. What containers create enough containment that we feel back inside their flow when we return to them? 

Some containers are marked by time. In one group, a writer shared her practice of folding her writing day into the way the light changed. On days she wrote, she would begin in late afternoon, in daylight, without any lamps or lights on, and continue writing through dusk as her room slowly darkened. In another group, a writer chose the same window but at the other pole of the day, rising in the dark and writing until the day was full day. In another group, another writer wrote late at night before bed, freely making a mess, then re-read her night pages first thing in the morning, making morning notes toward bringing them into some kind of order. All of these practices embedded themselves in the rhythms of the day and night. They might have been productive of something, but they were also, like toothbrushing, like eating, like waking and sleeping, something that belonged to the day and not only to the writing’s future as something that might circulate among others. 

In other groups, with other writers, different containers were found. Letting go of the ideal of dailiness, something else functions as a sustaining rhythm. Often these containers are documents combined with particular and limited tasks. One writer who is always with her phone, not only because we’re all always with our phones, it seems, but because her obligations take her away from her desk for most of her time, keeps an open note in the notes app, and adds to it whenever a small thought crystallizes in mind, and later, maybe only once in a writing cycle, carries these collected entries to her desk and transfers them to new pages, allowing herself to write into them, to reform them, to cull them, in the transfer process. Another writer kept an open document in which she collected words and images that appealed to her. Then once a week, as determined by the obligation to share pages, she looked through that collected pile of appealing things and wrote with or from it, leaving the pile at the end of the document like a combination pantry-compost. Something I am writing these days is held by its document and by a simple task. I open it up on a whim whenever I think of it, no more than once a day and often not for weeks at a time, and I add a single paragraph, either doing a fill-in-the-blanks game that amuses me and repeats as a grounding pulse throughout the ever-growing document, or picking up another thread that also carries through the pages. The limitation of the single paragraph is a pleasure for me, an inveterate spewer and piler-up of raw source material. Instead of going on and on, I fold as much pleasure-treasure into my paragraph as my whim that day holds and the paragraph can take. Then I close the document and forget about it. 

If the desire is to create writing that is alive, rather than writing that is good (thanks to Agnes Borinsky for reminding me recently of this way of renaming and so enlarging and enlivening the desire that attends the relationship we each have to our own writing), could we think of aliveness as something that is in cooperation with and maybe nourishing to our own aliveness. What does that mean for how writing occurs and is invited in the architecture of a day or week or year? Within what time cycle do we track its living energy? What numerical freedoms and mysteries are at play in its pattern of occurrence? What would its scene of communication be?